My pet theory is that the 2020 homicide spike may have been caused primarily by Covid unemployment checks, for which almost all were eligible -- at least at the

My pet theory is that the 2020 homicide spike may have been caused primarily by Covid unemployment checks, for which almost all were eligible -- at least at their base line level --, eligibility even extended to people who did not qualify for unemployment because they were not employed. Borrowing costs for business owners through PPP, and the Federal Reserve buying assets; juiced consumption so high we even ran out of spare change. All goods were inflated; this includes drug markets. If you use a proxy for drug use as fatal drug overdoes, drug overdoses increased thirty percent between 2019 to 2020 (71K to 91K), an unprecedented jump. I suspect that over the short term drug market supply is inelastic, and the people that sell drugs simply kill each other for market share, increasing the murder rate. This also may explain the precipitous drop in crime in the mid-1990s; the federal government largely stopped mailing people welfare checks, and people didn't have excess money for vice, subsequently fueling the drug trade and its associated gang conflict. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...